Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway (published on 14 May 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.

Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister", the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels back and forward in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure.

In 2005 the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels since 1923.

Virginia Adeline Woolf (née Stephen) (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels "Mrs Dalloway" (1925), "To the Lighthouse" (1927), and "Orlando" (1928), and the book-length essay "A Room of One's Own" (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

If one is to narrow the list of stream-of-consciousness’ founders of modern literature, one would inevitably highlight a very special woman with a room of her own – Virginia Woolf. A pioneer of feminist literature, a scandalous public figure with a fragile sexuality, a profoundly talented novelist and a tragic figure in her own way, Woolf is an embodiment of the flight for freedom of expression during the darkest years of the past century. Her great novels ‘Mrs. Dalloway” (1925) and “Orlando” (1928) are a remarkable experiment of capturing and grasping the effervescence of human life, the irreversible passage of time and the futile remains of the day. Committing suicide in 1941, Virginia Woolf took with herself the deep and tender secret of her own life, yet she bequeathed to the world a delicate and sophisticated glimpse at it to be savoured in reverent silence.